SCALES #4
Hello!
One thing that blew my nineteen-year-old mind in Music History 101 was a critical approach to the idea of virtuosity. Growing up taking classical piano lessons, without any formal classroom music instruction, I took the virtue of virtuosity as a given. Of course it's important to be able to play fast and intricate passages with flair—what more needs to be said? I loved the excitement of pushing my technique to the edge.
In lab, virtuosity shows up in less obvious ways. Right now I'm trying to figure out the most reliable way to transfer a micron-sized charged droplet out of an electrical field that suspends it in space, down a length of quarter-inch stainless-steel tubing, and into another volume directly outside of a mass spectrometer. It turns out all the design decisions that brought us to this setup has made this droplet transfer a nontrivial thing. I've been trying a lot of different combinations of changes to the gas flows blowing and sucking, and electrical fields pushing and pulling, on the droplet.
As I've been trying more and more subtle things, I've ended up with procedures that demand some degree of virtuosity on my part. With one hand I'm making extremely fine adjustments to a knob to adjust gas flow, while with the other hand I'm quickly punching in just the right new voltage to counteract that flow. With the wrong move, the droplet flies off uncontrollably and is lost.
I don't think this development of ornate, performing-in-the-moment procedures is preordained. In fact, to some extent I know the right solution probably involves taking a step back, figuring out more carefully what's making this so difficult, and making a tweak to lower the degree of difficulty. (And using a flow controller already, some of you might add!) But I guess my inclination when trying to solve a problem is to try pushing technique to its limits.
Sometimes after you spend a lot of time working on something new, you end up just running into yourself.
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So I've been listening to this podcast...
Code Switch on the Puerto Rican experience in Holyoke, Mass., home of the largest per capita Puerto Rican population in the continental U.S. (The first time I heard "tofu curtain" used to describe the dividing line in Western Mass. of the Five Colleges region from points south.)
I was really disappointed to miss the world premiere of Sofia Gubaidulina's Triple Concerto, but I enjoyed the WBUR preview focusing on the bayan, the Russian button accordion that Gubaidulina writes for. (Also see Zoë Madonna's review in the Globe.)
Other WBUR segments of note: One Syrian refugee family in New England, with children at a Vermont prep school. Following up with other Syrian refugees in Western MA. Growing income & health inequality, economic & racial segregation in Boston.
Cristela Alonzo on Death, Sex & Money.
Alexis Madrigal doesn't scale. (Also feeling pretty confident that I'll be linking to his new Containers podcast in an upcoming newsletter.)
Links
"[W]hen criticism ties itself to anything it risks acting like the scholar who can only see the poet as for or against his emperor."
Jessamyn West contextualizing the newly-discovered Whitman novel.
Nell Zink writes her mind on realist fiction, literary culture, and Doris Lessing.
When the New York paper of record moves away from review-based jazz coverage.
George Saunders on Chekov makes me want to dig out a college paper on the "About Love" trilogy.
The "best anagram in English" (feat. giant bats).
"For mass protests, such as those that have been happening recently, phone calls are a better way of contacting lawmakers, not because they get taken more seriously but because they take up more time."
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So I guess winter is over, then?
—Adam